A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

In Times of Trouble, I Turn to Sowell

The mid-term elections in November will be the most important in a generation.  Usually it is the presidential elections every four years that bring out the most voters and garner the most attention, but in 2010 things may well be very different.

Thomas Sowell of Stanford University's Hoover Institution writes this in his latest column:

Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for Congressional Democrats and for the President himself. But that is far from certain.

True, President Obama's approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the President will not be on the ballot until 2012.

They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats' control of Congress. As an old song said, "It ain't necessarily so."

He continues:

The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other "historic" changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

What will it matter if Obama's current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.

When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats' control of Congress as well.

But all is not lost.  I know it might feel that way right now, in the depressing shadow of this monstrosity of a bill...but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  It will take hard work.  It will require equipping yourself with knowledge.  It means dragging friends and relatives to town hall meetings (and perhaps even Tea Party rallies) this summer and fall.

The upcoming elections in November are critically important.  Sowell closes his piece with this:

The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don't usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.

Let's, as Senator Jim DeMint put it, make health care overhaul Obama's "Waterloo".